Collaborate with CDAR

Research Highlights

PANDA is a portal for accessing the computational resources developed, disseminated and maintained by the CDAR Center, which comprises a significant expansion of the drug abuse research tools, as well as information toward establishing the link between molecular, cellular, and systemic aspects of drug abuse and associated disorders. Read more

Mary Cheng and Ivet Bahar published an invited review article in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, addressing recent progress in the elucidation of the structural dynamics of monoamine transporters and their conformational landscape and transitions, as well as allosteric regulation mechanisms. Read more

Using quantitative live-cell fluorescence microscopy (Sorkin lab; U PITT) and molecular modeling (Bahar lab), they investigated the effects of the DAT inhibitor cocaine and its fluorescent analog JHC1-64 on the plasma membrane distribution of wild-type DAT and two DAT mutants.

Core C proposes a new approach, Linear Regression with Validated Association (LRVA) that discovers variants by utilizing the knowledge of known associations, making the variants with weaker signals easier to be identified. They have applied their method to Drug Abuse Disorders data set collected from CEDAR provided to them by Dr. Michael Vanyukov (PI of a FRP), and discovered nearly two dozen novel SNPs associated with drug abuse disorders. Literature search suggests that many of these SNPs reside in genes previously known to be involved with substance abuse. Read more